Linda Chavez: Could bombing have been prevented?

Twelve
years after September 11, our intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies
still haven’t fixed the data-sharing problems that make us vulnerable to more
attacks. It’s difficult to reach any other conclusion after unnamed
counterterrorism officials at the CIA recently revealed that Boston Marathon
bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev remained in their system as a person with possible
ties to terrorism, while the FBI had closed its investigation into the man.

If this
information had been shared between the agencies and the FBI had continued to
monitor his activities, could the bombing have been prevented? That is a
question no one can answer definitively. It may be that our laws still would
not have given the FBI sufficient authority to track him. And the sheer number
of individuals whose profiles suggest they pose similar risks may simply
overwhelm our ability to keep a close eye on all of them.

But one
thing does seem clear: Government authorities should have been able to identify
him as a suspect almost immediately after the bombing.

If they
had done so, it would have saved MIT police Officer Sean Collier’s life,
prevented injuries to other police officers who pursued the brothers, and
perhaps saved millions of dollars in shutting down major sections of Boston and
surrounding communities and the police efforts required to apprehend the
suspects.

Since the
FBI was involved in the investigation into the bombing from the beginning, why
didn’t they search their database for individuals who had been investigated for
potential ties to terrorism over the past several years? Surely Tsarnaev’s name
would have turned up. And if not, why not?

If his
name had come up, wouldn’t the FBI or other law enforcement figures have gone
out to interview him immediately after the bombing? We know from the secretary
of homeland security that his departure for Russia was noted in the
department’s counterterrorism database.

Surely
investigators who knew that he’d recently visited the Russian province of
Dagestan, a hotbed of Muslim extremism, should have quickly put him on a list
of possible suspects.

If the
information available to the CIA and homeland security were available to all
federal counterterrorism agencies, it should have triggered alarms as soon as
the bombing occurred.

If this
act of terrorism had been an ordinary crime — say the abduction of a child —
law enforcement immediately would have combed their records for the presence of
individuals in the surrounding community who raised suspicion based on previous
crimes, or who had been the subject of investigations for unsolved crimes. So
why did the feds not turn up Tsarnaev’s name? After all, a foreign government
had alerted U.S. authorities that he was a person who might be involved in
terrorist planning or activities.

Hindsight
is always 20-20, and there is a tendency to think we should be able to prevent
bad things from happening.

But as
former President George W. Bush said, in order to do so, we have to be right
100 percent of the time, and the bad guys only need to be right once.

We have
uncovered similar plots, and it may be that we will never be right every time,
especially since we need to balance protecting our civil liberties and privacy
rights with being able to prevent terrorism.

None of
us wants to live in a police state that monitors everyone’s move.

But that
doesn’t mean we can’t do better. We may not be able to prevent every single act
of terrorism, but we should be able to quickly apprehend those involved when
their names are already on our watch lists. Thankfully, Tsarnaev and his
younger brother were stopped before they could finish the job they started —
which included bombing Times Square, as investigators learned recently.

We won’t
get better at preventing such terrorist acts, however, until all
counterterrorism information is shared between agencies. Congress should
investigate why this isn’t happening.

If the
reason is that the agencies lack the legal authority to do so, Congress should
change the laws. But even before that happens, the FBI should launch its own
investigation into why officials in their Boston office didn’t quickly discover
Tsarnaev’s name in their own files and act on it immediately after the bombing.

LINDA CHAVEZ’S column is distributed by
Creators Syndicate Inc.

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